The Art of Mourning

The Art of Mourning - Inaugural Conference

Date
Thursday 12 – Friday 13 November 2026
Time
15:00 – 18:30
each day, with intervals between sessions with complimentary refreshments
Location
Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo
Palazzo Valier, Venice

What remains after loss?

How do memory, ritual, objects, and images continue to hold those who are no longer here?

The Art of Mourning is the inaugural conference of Il Salotto della Memoria, a new programme by Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo dedicated to the many forms through which absence is transformed into memory, and memory into living cultural experience.

Set within Palazzo Valier in Venice, the conference brings together an exceptional group of speakers whose work moves across psychoanalysis, mourning jewellery, inheritance, photography, anthropology, and material culture. Over two afternoons, The Art of Mourning will open a rich and intimate reflection on grief,  not only as a private wound, but as something shaped through objects, gestures, rituals, and acts of remembrance.

Rather than approaching mourning as a single subject, the conference unfolds as a constellation of perspectives: from the inner psychological labour of grief, to the symbolic language of jewellery, from the afterlife of personal belongings to the role of photography, hair, and material traces in preserving emotional presence across time.

Participants include:
Dr. Andrea Fiorentini
Psychoanalyst Andrea Fiorentini will open the programme with a reflection on the psychological work of mourning: its breakdown, its denial, and its possible transformation. Drawing from clinical practice, his contribution offers a powerful framework for understanding how loss may remain unresolved, be resisted, or gradually become part of a renewed inner life through memory.

Sarah Nehama
A leading authority on mourning jewellery, Sarah Nehama will present a lecture on sentimental and mourning jewellery, examining the extraordinary ways in which rings, lockets, brooches, and miniature memorial objects have historically carried grief, devotion, and remembrance. Her work reveals how jewellery can function not merely as ornament, but as an intimate architecture of memory.

Margaux Serrano
Drawing on her experience as an auctioneer, Margaux Serrano will reflect on the emotional afterlife of objects passing through estates and inheritances. Her perspective brings us close to those belongings that survive us: pieces marked by use, affection, inscription, and transmission, which often become the last witnesses of a life, a bond, or a grief.

Sarah-Luna Berrue
Sarah-Luna Berrué-Fahy, currently a junior specialist at the jewelry department of the Parisian auction house Gros & Delettrez, will be joining Margaux Serrano in a literary and research-based perspective to questions of memory, inheritance, and emotional narrative, helping open the discussion toward the stories that objects carry and the fragile human presences they continue to evoke.

Jay Davani
Persian artist and founder of Project Mortem, Jay Davani will explore photography as a space of mourning, remembrance, and collective reflection. Drawing from her work as a death advocate and grief facilitator, her contribution considers the image not only as documentation, but as a site where absence is framed, held, and revisited and where grief may take on visual form through memory, ritual, and visual storytelling.

Nuri McBride
Perfumer, cultural historian, and founder of Atropos Parfums, Nuri McBride will explore scent as a living trace of memory, grief, and the body. Drawing from her research for the Death/Scent Project, her contribution will consider how smell mediates mourning, embodiment, and the persistence of the dead within personal and cultural memory. Alongside her lecture, The Persistence of the Dead: Scent, Memory, and the Body, she will lead a Scent Walk inviting participants to engage with remembrance through an immersive sensory experience.

Allison Zurfluh
Swiss-Californian artist Allison Zurfluh will explore the relationship between memory, place, loss, and the fragile ecology of the Venetian Lagoon. Drawing from a practice rooted in observation, immersion, and sustained dialogue with the landscape, her contribution will consider how art can preserve threatened environments, translate absence into material form, and create new ways of remembering what is at risk of disappearing.

Micah Perks
Award-winning author and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Micah Perks will explore autobiographical writing as a space for mourning, memory, and transformation. Drawing from her work as a novelist and educator, her contribution invites participants to consider storytelling as a creative practice through which grief can be witnessed, shared, and reimagined, offering new ways of navigating loss through language and imagination.

Please note that additional participants are yet to be confirmed

Themes explored

The psychological work of mourning and its transformations

Mourning jewellery and sentimental objects as carriers of grief

Inheritance, estate objects, and the afterlife of personal belonging

Photography as a medium of remembrance and collective memory

Hair as relic, trace, and material presence

Ritual, symbolism, and cultural forms of mourning

Through lectures, conversations, and moments of exchange, the conference invites the public into a rare and layered dialogue on the forms through which we continue to live with absence.